Tag Archives: bedevilments

Here are thousands of [sober] men and women, worldly indeed. They flatly declare that since they have come to believe in a Power greater than themselves… there has been a revolutionary change in their way of living and thinking. In the face of collapse and despair… they found that a new power, peace, happiness, and sense of direction flowed into them.

…Is not our age characterized by the ease with which we… throw away the theory or gadget which does not work for something new which does? We had to ask ourselves why we shouldn’t apply to our human problems this same readiness. We were having trouble with personal relationships, we couldn’t control our emotional natures, we were a prey to misery and depression, we couldn’t make a living, we had a feeling of uselessness, we were full of fear, we were unhappy, we couldn’t seem to be of real help to other people— was not a basic solution of these bedevilments more important than whether we should see [an ad for some new gadget]? Of course it was…

The bedevilments sum up how life sucks for an active alcoholic – or for one dry without a solution. Anyone familiar with the Big Book knows of them. They make up yet another passage where the AA founders nailed our experience, so the hurting alcoholic marvels as s/he reads, “How did they know-?”

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The bedevilments hurt like hell because they’re symptoms of our dying spirits. Fear cuts us off from the love that would sustain us, so we languish like plants without sunlight. Drinking temporarily soothes that pain while ego promises to fix everything by grabbing more admiration from the outside world (via accomplishments, attractiveness, wealth, etc). What else could possibly help us besides self-medicating and vanquishing all the assholes in our life?

This chapter, “We Agnostics,” offers an alternative: If we replace religious ideas of God with open-minded spirituality, we can examine the results of faith just as we would any other phenomenon – scientifically. We see that people who adopt faith in a higher power go from the shit pile to thriving. We see it over and over. Linking the two events causally – is that such an illogical jump? To say, “Hmm… looks like this faith gadget works wayyy better than the self-reliance gadget I’ve been using” – ?

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That’s how models function in science. We observe phenomena and devise a theory, a model that explains what’s going on. We can’t isolate or observe faith, but we can note its effects. Faith (and the rigorous stepwork it inspires) arrests the misery of alcoholism. In drunk after drunk, this shit works. We don’t have to know why.

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Still, I remember how I reacted the first time I read “We Agnostics.” Yes, I suffered all the bedevilments (though I didn’t give a shit about not helping others), but I wasn’t going to buy the idea that what had worked for millions of other people would work for me. No, because I was smarter. And I hurt worse. And the prospect of seeking god felt weirder to me than it had for those guys – obviously. Just in general, other people were so other-peopleish! They had nothing to do with me. They were packed in society like canned beans, whereas I had flowered and grown on the vine of my life, bobbing in breezes and raindrops they’d never experienced.

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This is the catch-22 of getting sober in AA: we have to trust that we are like others before we can really believe it to be so. If we trust, we can do what they did and get what they got – but at the start we don’t trust anything! Even booze, our best buddy ever, has turned on us. Or has it? Maybe we should try one more time with the bootstraps and a little less bottle? Isn’t that more likely to work than something so preposterous?

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And yet we try the unknown thing. We step out into air. There’s something in AA meetings, some energy we can’t identify that keeps us coming back. My brain told me emphatically that AA would never work, yet my hope, my heart, and somehow my car keys carried me to meeting after meeting, where I heard people speaking authentically of ruined relationships, self-loathing, wild emotions, relentless fears, and pain-filled loneliness just like mine – that no longer ruled their lives. I could see it in their eyes, hear it in their voices: they were free.

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Grace. What is it? It’s defined as “unmerited divine assistance,” a gift from god we receive without earning. The longer I’m sober, the more I see it’s all grace: every breath I take, every sensation, every emotion, every moment of being alive on this earth. How could I “earn” any of that? I was graced with the utter defeat of my wrecked life. I was graced to meet the person who took me to my first AA meeting. Graced to find myself out of answers, sick of believing my broken brain over and over, desperate enough to show up despite immense skepticism. The short version is that I was graced with surrender: “Maybe there is something; maybe I can ask it to help me.”

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That opened the door enough for those first rays of sunlight to touch me. Three steps forward, two steps back, I’ve progressed through life’s vicissitudes and cycles of stepwork to reach my own intimate experience with a god that I now love with everything in me. Today I can see how god – that energy of love powering every element of life – is in you. I can love you with no self-interest – no more than I have in loving a robin, or a birch tree, or a puffy white cloud shifting across the blue expanse of sky. Look at you being you!

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And what a wonder it still is, as I come up on 22 years sober, to watch AA newcomers at the outset of their own journey. They come in with bedeviled pain and discontent practically scribbling the space above their chairs. Today, I get to flatly declare to them the peace, happiness, and sense of direction with which I’ve been graced – and watch them find it, too.